Journal of Family Violence最新文献

Purpose

Social workers and health professionals play a relevant role in the detection and intervention of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW). However, these professionals may exert public stigma against IPVAW survivors, which prevents disclosure, help seeking and affects women’s health. There are no comprehensive models that explain stigma functioning in Spain. Our aim was to explore the functioning of such stigma that may be exercised by social workers and health professionals in Spain. Their perceived impact of stigma on survivors was also studied.

Methods

Interviews with 18 providers were conducted and analyzed through template analysis.

Results

The findings confirmed the presence of stigma and revealed that it was often unintentional. Factors about the Roots of stigma were identified (e.g., Privileged social identities or Symptom-focused role of psychology), which triggered several Myths about IPVAW and survivors (e.g., Broken toy or Survivor-profile) and Stigmatizing responses (e.g., Being paternalistic or Judging) when offering professional help. Several consequences of these myths and responses showed the perceived high Cost of stigma for survivors (e.g., Leaving support services or Internalizing stigma).

Conclusions

The results confirmed the importance of effective professional training to prevent stigmatizing myths and responses. Training should reduce professionals’ patriarchal values, increase their knowledge about IPVAW, self-reflection on how personal experiences and social identity influence their practice, and self-reflection on their own practice in general. Such training should also promote an intersectional perspective on recovery, a view of survivors as agents, a contextual approach, active listening, close contact with survivors, and informed care.

Purpose

Post-relationship pursuit can range from normative to problematic, including stalking. While there are some theories and research about motivations for engaging in unwanted pursuit behaviors (UPBs), most lack the first-person perspectives of people who pursue. Little is known about the ways these individuals make sense of their behaviors and their related motivations. No qualitative studies have examined such meaning-making in non-forensic, young adult datasets.

Methods

In a larger survey study, 141 undergraduate students who endorsed a history of severe UPBs indicated their personal reasons for engaging in the UPBs. We used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze patterns across the dataset.

Results

Through our analytic co-creation of meaning, we conceptualized participants’ UPBs as located in narratives. Some participants understood their UPBs as instrumental ways to control their stories, using UPBs to grapple with (un)certainty or hold power over their former partner. Other participants understood their UPBs as powerlessly reactive in their story. A subset of participants denied ownership of their UPBs.

Conclusions

Severe UPBs are entwined in personal and social narratives, with people who pursue making sense of the behaviors as having diverse roles and motivations. Meaning-making about UPBs creates social narratives wherein people who pursue create complex realities, including being both victims and offenders, among others. Both personal and social interventions, such as psychotherapy and education respectively, are warranted for the prevention and treatment of severe UPBs. Future research should use more in-depth qualitative methods to understand pathways of UPBs and related processes.

Purpose

Examining the influence of policy change and socio-political factors is paramount for contextualizing and addressing sexual violence. The purpose of this paper is to provide findings from a secondary qualitative analysis of the impacts of national and local high-profile events on the dialogue and actions surrounding violence prevention and response on college campuses.

Methods

Data from mcBEE, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded project exploring the adoption and implementation of violence prevention programming on multiple college campuses in the United States were used for this analysis. Data include responses from 60-min telephone interviews with key informants (i.e., campus personnel in administrative roles or connected to violence prevention programming efforts) between 2017 and 2019.

Results

Interviews (n = 68) revealed that high-profile events (i.e., Title IX legislation, news coverage of sexual assault cases, and the #MeToo and It’s On Us movements) increased dialogue about violence prevention and response on some campuses, while others experienced activism and advocacy surrounding sexual assault, including greater accountability and response from campus leadership. Some participants connected national political discourse (i.e., the 2016 presidential election, Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court) to increases in violence perpetration and decreased reporting and help-seeking behaviors after sexual assault.

Conclusions

Sociopolitical events and shifts in national dialogue surrounding violence affect perceptions and behaviors among students, faculty, staff, and overall college campus communities. Identifying potential impacts of national events can inform future prevention and response efforts and mobilize campus communities toward meaningful change.

Introduction

Child maltreatment significantly impacts youths’ mental and physical health into adulthood. While resources can help, many victims only disclose their experiences to peers, often through social media. The way children use these platforms to reveal maltreatment is not well understood.

Objective

This research aimed to analyze disclosures of child maltreatment on the online platform TalkLife, focusing on the nature of disclosures, motivations, and subsequent actions or feelings described.

Methods

We conducted a two-phase qualitative content analysis of anonymized TalkLife posts. Initially, we devised a definition for child maltreatment, which we applied to 3,669 posts labeled “suspected family issues” by TalkLife algorithms, identifying 263 posts related to child maltreatment. We then further analyzed these using qualitative content analysis.

Results

TalkLife users revealed diverse maltreatment experiences with mental/emotional, physical, and sexual abuse mentioned most often. Disclosures, largely by victims, often cited nuclear family perpetrators. Factors triggering disclosures included recent abuse, emotional states, or seeing related posts. Users sought to vent, solicit advice, inquire about abuse, joke, or share desires. Many youth shared their emotional and traumatic responses to the abuse which spanned from confrontation to flight. A minority detailed others’ reactions to their disclosures, with both support and disregard observed.

Conclusion

These results underscore the disclosure needs of maltreated youth, showing some turn to online platforms for peer support. As online disclosures grow, we must equip youth to address peers’ revelations. Platforms could also use algorithms to identify such disclosures, offering trauma-informed resources.

Purpose

To develop a response to an identified service gap for domestic violence (DV) victim-survivors who are living with their abusive partner and have children in their care, Keeping Safe Together (KST) was designed as an ‘all of family’ program and piloted over 18-months in Victoria, Australia. The purpose of this brief report is to explore how children had experienced the KST program, and what, if any, changes to their safety and situations they experienced because of the program.

Methods

Interviews were conducted with eight children engaged in the program alongside their family members. Thematic analysis of the data was undertaken to draw out themes.

Results

The children were aware of the impact of the violence and conflict on their families. They demonstrated strong empathy for their family members’ wellbeing, and a desire for change. The children saw the KST program as having a positive impact on their own and their families’ safety and circumstances, particularly in terms of reducing their fathers’ abusive behaviors. The program supported them to increase their own sense of control, happiness, and development of coping strategies.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that the program met a significant support gap and improved the lives of children in this sample who were living with fathers using violence against their mothers. Further trial and evaluation of ‘all of family’ programs such as KST is needed to build the evidence base on their effectiveness for children.

Purpose

Child welfare service provision in Ontario, Canada has evolved significantly over the last two decades, especially regarding child exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV). After the addition of child exposure to IPV to the province’s Eligibility Spectrum, it now constitutes the largest proportion of substantiated maltreatment investigations. However, the interpretation and implementation of these policies by Ontario child welfare authorities remain unclear. The impact on service users has also been understudied.

Method

This study explored the implementation of policies and practices used by child welfare services when responding to families investigated for child exposure to IPV. This study also aimed to better understand the impact of these policies and practices on service users. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with senior child protection service supervisors and managers across Ontario. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data.

Results

Four themes were identified: (1) collaborating with the violence against women sector brings forth both opportunities and challenges, some of which are linked to distrust and fundamentally opposing ideologies, (2) systemic issues and gaps severely limit workers’ efforts to help families, (3) responses do not meet the intersecting and diverse needs of families, and (4) key differences in approaches when working with perpetrators compared to victims.

Conclusions

These findings emphasize the importance of providing families with flexible and individualized services that better meet their complex needs. The need for increased funding, enhanced cross-sector collaboration, and a shift in focus from the victim to the perpetrator is also underscored.

Purpose

This study aimed to understand how college-going young men and women in Bengaluru, India experience violence within dating relationships and their understanding of the role of gender in dating violence.

Methods

In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 undergraduate students aged between 18 and 21 years old. The data were analyzed using the framework of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis.

Results

Five key themes emerged from participants’ accounts: (1) defining abuse, (2) experiencing abuse (3) impact of abuse (4) abuse is gendered and (5) abuse is multifaceted. The first theme identifies how definitions of abuse are ambiguous and context-specific while the second theme discusses how young adults experience abuse as feeling controlled, losing control or self-protection. The third theme highlights how abuse causes distress but can also invoke coping while the fourth theme discusses the unique gender dynamics in abuse. Finally, the fifth theme identifies the perceived role of individual and community-level efforts in preventing abuse.

Conclusions

Violence is experienced as a complex and distressing part of dating relationships. The phenomenological insights gained from the study underscore the need for early identification and have implications for developing dating violence interventions in colleges and for future research in similar contexts.

Purpose

The current study aimed to explicate the link between relationship cycling (breaking up and renewing) and aggression. The goals were to: (1) assess if different types of aggression were more prevalent in cyclical as compared to non-cyclical relationships, and (2) determine how conflict management and relational dependence might explain the association between cycling and aggression.

Methods

Using CloudResearch.com, longitudinal data across four months from 177 individuals in challenging relationships were collected. Participants completed up to six surveys three weeks apart. Psychological and physical violence as well as coercive control were assessed as indicators of aggression; participants rated both their own and their partners’ aggression. Aggression, conflict, and relational dependence were collected at each timepoint in addition to the occurrence of breakups and renewals. Cyclical and non-cyclical categorizations were determined by the baseline data.

Results

Cyclical partners (as compared to non-cyclical) were more likely to experience unidirectional, severe violence and control and less likely to report no violence or control in their relationships. Analyses also showed that managing conflict ineffectively was associated with violence and control (particularly by participants’ partners), and participants’ relational dependence was associated with their own controlling behaviors towards their partners. In assessing relational transitions, aggression, conflict, and dependence all predicted breakups across four months; yet, only aggression predicted renewals.

Conclusion

Overall, findings suggest aggression leads to cycling (i.e., renewals). Additionally, more dynamic, interactive processes (e.g., conflict management) might explicate the link between aggression and relational transitions better than more stable relational qualities (e.g., relational dependence).

Purpose

Cyber dating abuse (CDA) has proliferated alongside the use of electronic communication technologies. Research indicates that further understanding into the individual and relational correlates of CDA will aid efforts to prevent harmful cyber dating behaviors. This study examined whether positive or negative romantic relationship quality act as intermediary variables between emotion regulation and CDA perpetration within and between romantic partners.

Method

A sample of 65 emerging adult heterosexual couples completed self-report measures on emotion regulation, positive and negative romantic relationship quality, and CDA perpetration. Data were analyzed using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model for Mediation.

Results

The results revealed that a person’s higher emotion regulation indirectly related to their own lower CDA perpetration through their own lower negative relationship quality for both women and men. Results also showed that women’s and men’s own higher emotion regulation related to their partner’s lower reports on negative relationship quality which, in turn, related to that partner’s lower reports on CDA perpetration.

Conclusions

The findings provide insight into how a sense of emptiness in romantic relationships can explain the link between emotion regulation and CDA perpetration. Implications for preventing CDA through targeting emotion regulation skills and healthy romantic relationships are discussed.

Purpose

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious public health concern that is highly prevalent among couples with alcohol misuse. It is well-established that alcohol can exacerbate negative IPV outcomes; however, less is known about how hazardous alcohol consumption, combined with family composition, such as the presence of children in the home, may impact IPV in a dyadic context. The current study examined the separate and interactive roles of the couple’s caretaking status and alcohol use disorder (AUD) severity on psychological and physical IPV victimization.

Methods

Secondary data were analyzed from 100 couples considered high risk due to reporting physical IPV and at least one partner meeting criteria for AUD. Multilevel mixture models were used to dyadically test how caretaking status and each partner’s AUD severity, separately and interactively, related to the couple’s psychological and physical IPV severity.

Results

Caretaking status and one’s own AUD severity, when examined separately, were positively related to psychological and physical IPV victimization. One’s partner’s AUD severity was also related to severity of physical IPV victimization. There was no evidence of an interaction in this sample.

Conclusions

Caretaking status played an important role in IPV victimization even when accounting for AUD in high-risk couples. Caretaking status and AUD did not interact; however, the significant main effects suggest an additive association, such that the combination of AUD severity and caretaking is more risky for IPV victimization than either factor alone. Findings highlight the importance of considering family composition and alcohol use behaviors on IPV risk.